Dating While Bi: Stress and Straight-Passing Privilege

Each person is an unique individual. There are no generalizations I can make about "women doing this" or "men doing that" when it comes to dating, and I don't think that such generalizations should be made in the first place; I think that people are best approached without gendered expectations anyways. No, what I want to talk about is the reactions you get when you are in a same-sex couple and how those contrast to the ones you receive while in a het couple, and how this social scorn and social acceptance affects both types of relationships.

Society celebrates het couples, couples that are men and women. We see them in countless movies, television shows, books, on the radio, openly out and about in public. They are not just the norm, they are the cherished norm, the norm upheld very often as the only thing to aspire to over being single, over being celibate, and definitely over being in a same-sex relationship.

Same-sex relationships, on the other hand, are incredibly stressful because of the intense negativity and scrutiny you receive from strangers. I remember walking around just holding hands with my girlfriend. People actually stopped and glared at us. I was afraid to kiss her in public after bystanders actually shouted at us for a simple peck on the cheek. That stress stays with you throughout every negative reaction, every absent space where you can't find a queer couple to identify with or cheer for in a book or television show, and every threat of violence.

Violence haunted my queer relationships. Every time I would find another example of violence against queer women it would stick in my head, and surface to the top of my mind whenever I was with my partner. The lesbian couple beaten at their son's soccer game by a father of another child was one such example, but there are countless stories of hate crimes like that one, and each one felt personal for me. Each one felt all too real.

Once, at night, I and my queer partner were walking down the street, holding hands, and a car pulled to a crawl besides us so that the driver could lean out and shout, "Are you lesbians?" It was one of the most genuinely frightening moments of my life. I simply didn't know what would happen next, if the guy and his friends would get out of their car, what they might do to us.

I am afforded a definite privilege by being in a relationship with a man. Although we are both bisexual, we appear as a straight couple, and we receive all the social benefits that go along with that. After being in queer couples for most of my dating life, being married to a man feels like cheating, somehow; like playing the game on easy mode. It's sad to think how much happier my other relationships would have been with the same social ease and acceptance that my husband and I are given now. That's why sanctuaries for LGBT people are so important: they create a space, ideally, where we can get that support and that acceptance for our queer relationships that we can't get elsewhere. That's why these sanctuaries deserve to be protected.

And it's why the shooting in Orlando struck such a chord with me and with many people in the LGBT community. We are aware that just living our lives as ourselves puts us at a certain level of risk, and the deaths of many young people at the hands of a homophobic gunman illustrates for us just how fatal that risk could be.

I debated writing about this because of my bisexuality. Dating and marrying a man after years of dating anyone but a man has inescapably called my queer identity into question for me. I speak, after all, now from the comfort of an opposite-sex relationship, a comfort that may sit uneasily with me but which is a comfort nonetheless. What decided me was the feeling of fear that still creeps up for me whenever I share my bisexuality, or whenever it is shared for me; fear that the other person will respond with verbal or physical violence; fear that being who I am could get me hurt. That fear is still a part of my everyday life. And so here I am, writing.

#bisexuality #dating